Some months ago, Cristina Sal Salvador del Valle, who is responsible for the social impact at the BBK Foundation and is my fellow sufferer in this thing called entrepreneurship, got in touch with me to see if I could make an ad hoc mentoring session for a project in education to strengthen certain issues. You can imagine that it didn’t take too long for me to say yes, of course. The day chosen for the mentoring, the 4th of June 2019, which, by the way, is a very important date for me, started this adventure. Roberto Álvarez was there, the founder and CEO of a company that “soon” would become an ally in the great adventure that is entrepreneurship, education and digital competence.
Here starts today’s post that, honestly, gives me good feelings and memories, and makes me want to join forces to do my small part in a topic that worries me more every day. I encourage you to know Gaptain.
Let me give you a little bit of context, 4th of June, social and environmental entrepreneurship and impact, digital competence, education, BBK Foundation, Bizkaia Aretoa, the projects and BBK Venture Philanthropy.
I’m going to start with the BBK Venture Philanthropy. It’s an accompanying and project financing program with a high social impact driven by BBK and Ship2B, whose goal is to promote entrepreneurship and the investment in social and environmental impact in the province of Bizkaia. More than 100 projects were presented in this call, 10 made it to the first phase and 4 startups were the finalists. After working with professionals of different sectors on the value proposals, the business models and the impacts of their projects, 4 were selected to receive a personalized mentoring for 4 months with experts, so they could analyze strategic alliances with big companies of the Ship2B ecosystem, and could opt for funding up to 100k euros and access to investment vehicles managed by Ship2B and BBK of 5M euros. Is that all! The four projects selected were: Gaptain, Kuvu, Life Kontainer and WATS.
Here you have a video where Cristina explains (in Spanish) better the BBK Venture Philanthropy program’s goal:
Well, the 4th of June we met with Roberto, from Gaptain, and our adventure started. And I say “we met”, because there I was with my other great ally in this world of entrepreneurship, Jessica Paños.
But let’s get to the point and move on to the other part of the post: the irruption of technology in our lives, which has created a big digital gap and has led, among others, parents and teachers to be aware of the need of developing THE digital competence. All of it with the goal of educating, protecting and teaching our children in the digital world.
The children of our society are more and more exposed to the new digital risks. Sextortion, cyberbullying, viral challenges, very violent content, pornography and sexual predators are just an example.
It doesn’t exist any whole answer for these problems, which are treated with small patches and partial and uncoordinated solutions (parental control apps, safety shields, specific awareness campaigns, awareness-raising talks from the police…). Moreover, there is a visible lack of coordination between schools, families and the children themselves.
Here comes Gaptain, who has developed KIDS CENTRIC, a complete solution through an iterative method who makes an initial measure of the digital competence, creates a diagnosis and proposes an intervention program to train teachers, students and families digitally. Specifically, through a unit of artificial intelligence, Gaptain gets a sociogram of a classroom of a school. From there, they identify it and create a digital risk map in order to develop a specific and personalized digital skills program for each context.
The methodology of Kids Centric starts analyzing the coexistence and digital activity of the students. It measures the degree of cohesion, wellbeing and gender segregation to establish the core indicators that will be references to evaluate the impact of the intervention through the workshops. From there, teachers and students of the specific schools will receive workshops designed by specialists in digital risks, privacy and values.
Teacher, principals and students have evaluated KIDS CENTRIC in different schools during 2018 very positively. The tool has let them identify cases of invisible bullying, cohesion problems and gender segregation.
Gaptain wants to automate and integrate the whole system in order to give complete solutions and to create the Kids Centric Observatory. Thanks to the data collected in each school, through the observatory they will try to identify tendencies and behaviour changes in early ages that could affect, among others, to coexisting.
Besides, Gaptain wants to propose that they certify the Segureskola hallmark for the schools through that Observatory.
In our case, from the team of eDucaR (Deusto Education Research) of the University of Deusto, we are going to collaborate with Gaptain in order to maintain a coherence in its training proposals through the workshops between what’s declared in the Decree 236/2015 of the 22nd of December, which establishes the Basic Education curriculum and is implemented in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, on digital competence, the National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training (INTEF), and the European Digital Competence (DigComp). In our case, we compromise with the following goals:
- Advising about design, development and evaluation of the training workshops.
- Revising the competences, goals and learning content proposed for the programmed workshops according to the legal educational documents for its correct implementation.
- Analyzing the adequacy of the activities suggested in the workshops.
- Advising in the formulation of evaluation criteria and/or indicators that evaluate the development of the digital competence and its goals.
- Proposing possible new workshops.
Last October 16th at 17:00, we invited schools, and everyone who was interested, to an information day and to a networking after that, about Segureskola. It was a nice ay to keep in touch with colleagues.
Let’s stop worrying and start dealing with the digital competence.
Have a good week.
Translated by María Ubierna Quintanilla and supervised by Arantza Arruti.